The cast and creative team of “Cheer” by Bella Smith, one of the new works premiering at the North Georgia Play New Play Festival. (Photo by Zach Stolz)
“Supporting new work is the only way you get a new canon,” says Woodstock Arts Artistic Director Zach Stolz. “That’s how we, as an industry, continue to grow.”
This belief is what inspired Stolz, who took over as artistic director in January of 2022, to create the North Georgia New Play Festival. The event runs September 26 through September 28 and will feature staged readings of new works by five Georgia-based playwrights.
Stolz drew heavily on his own experience of new play development, having grown up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he was frequently involved with the Arkansas New Play Festival. He also attended the University of Arkansas, home to an MFA playwriting program, and Stolz would often act or direct in those readings. All of this experience informed the overall structure of the North Georgia New Play Festival. “Atlanta has developed so many different avenues of new play development, I really wanted to figure out where we fit into that.”
Woodstock Arts Artistic Director Zach Stolz.
Playwright Abe Johnson (they/them) serves as literary manager for the festival, helping Stolz curate the selection of plays and providing dramaturgy work to the playwrights ahead of the rehearsal process. As a playwright themself, Johnson was also able to provide Stolz insight on what would and would not work in a new play development program.
The Festival will last for three days, with one reading on Friday, September 26, and two readings per day on Saturday, September 27, and Sunday, September 28. The process kicked off this past Monday with the playwrights, actors and creative teams coming together for an initial welcome meeting. After that, the first three days of this week were devoted to table work and script rewrites and Thursday was devoted to staging. Each reading will be followed by a talk back led by Johnson, who will also hold postmortems with several of the playwrights to reflect upon their experience.
When asked what they looked for in terms of play selection, Stolz and Johnson zeroed in on plays that felt timely and fresh. “One of the things that I was really looking for was something that feels new,” says Stolz. “That feels like we are exploring in a way that is unfamiliar or that raises up a perspective of voices that we’re not engaging with very much.”
The result is an eclectic roster of plays spanning a wide range of genres and subject matters:
Holy Chicken Sandwich by Kira Rockwell presents the cosmic weirdness that unfolds on the eve of the opening of a popular fried chicken chain.
What We Talk About or The Common Room Play by Anna Schwartz explores the social dynamics and challenges faced by a group of first semester college freshmen.
Cheer! by Bella Smith is a surrealist piece about a group of “feral, power-hungry cheerleaders” as they scramble to be the best.
Showing by Gabrielle Sinclair-Compton is an ode to motherhood told through the lens of a gender reveal party.
Finally, The Scariest Thing to See in the Woods by Julia Byrne sees a group of young people head out into the wilderness hoping to build an ideal society.
Selecting these plays had as much to do with the quality of each script as it did with curating a lineup that would work well together. “Once you get it whittled down to like the top 12,” Johnson says, “it just becomes like playing Jenga, trying to get the right combination of plays and paying attention to the diversity of genres and finding plays that are interesting in conversation with each other.”
Cast and creative crew mingling at Monday’s welcome meeting.
It was also important for them to select plays that speak to our current moment in history. “There were some beautiful plays that were very evergreen,” says Stolz. “But we really wanted to ask ‘Why this play and why now?’ For example, Cheer hits on this pop culture shift we’re seeing toward celebrations of feral girlhood, so it feels very of the zeitgeist.”
Even with all of these exciting new works, Stolz confesses he is perhaps most excited to see all of these artists coming together: “The reason I continue to stay in theater and will never leave it is the beauty of the community that theater can create. Just the pathways of connection that will come out of this are the most immediately exciting thing to me.”
Where & When
The North Georgia New Play Festival will take place at Woodstock Arts Theatre September 26 through September 28. Tickets are $10 per reading or $18 for a pass.
8534 Main St., Woodstock, Georgia.
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Luke Evans is an Atlanta-based writer, critic and dramaturg. He covers theater for ArtsATL and Broadway World Atlanta and has worked with theaters such as the Alliance, Actor’s Express, Out Front Theatre and Woodstock Arts. He’s a graduate of Oglethorpe University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, and the University of Houston, where he earned his master’s.
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